The Difference 

Tomorrow is Independence Day, the day the Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence. Only two people definitely signed it that day, The President of the Congress, John Hancock, and Secretary Charles Thompson.   Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and John Adams claimed they signed it then, too, but historians have disagreed for decades on whether they did and when the other signers added their signatures.

The course of human events had made it necessary to dissolve the political bands that had linked the colonies with Great Britain.

What of the people from whom we separated?  Are they different from us after almost 250 years?

We recently spent two weeks sharing streets, buildings, restaurants, and other places with them, people differing from us only in accent, the side of the road on which they drive, and dogs.

The people of the United Kingdom do love their dogs and they take them everywhere. It’s a rare restaurant that has a sign we are familiar with: “Service dogs only.”   We saw one sign that told us we could buy vegan ice cream for our dog inside.  One of our hotels had a kiosk with a dog menu.

We loved our exploration of their country.  We enjoyed meeting the many people we met. Our guides were incredible.  Every citizen was friendly and courteous and proud to show us things or explain things—-as we would be for those from England who visit our country. They, like us, are free people.  But our definitions of freedom are a little bit different—-which is why our country got its divorce in 1776.

But few citizens of this country likely would want to trade places with those good folks as far as government is concerned and as far as the citizen’s voice is heard in government.

Much of our system of government and laws is based on the centuries-old policies born in England starting with King John I’s acceptance of demands by several of his Barons at Runnymede in June, 1215 in the Magna Carta. The document placed the King and all the Sovereigns who have come after him within the rule of law, a concept we are arguing in this country more than 800 years later.

The document remains a symbol of freedom from government oppression. It’s philosophy was brought to our shores with the early English settlers and was a precedent for the Declaration of Independence.

But our founders took the concepts far beyond the Magna Carta, and we were surprised by how hard our differences in approach to rule hit home with us during our visits to two places within the last month.

This is the Tower of London:

And this is Edinburgh Castle in Scotland:

What is inside these two structures says much about our differing national concepts of government.

The Tower of London, among other things, is the home of The Crown Jewels.  Edinburgh Castle houses the much smaller Honours of Scotland, that country’s crown jewels that date from the days before Scotland became part of the United Kingdom. When a new monarch is coronated, these items are ceremonially donned to symbolize the monarchy’s rule over all of the UK.

We would like to show you pictures of this collection; it’s overwhelming. But photography is not allowed in the darkened rooms where spotlights illuminate the sparkling and glowing treasured regalia that is kept behind enclosures. Visitors can purchase a $10 guidebook, however.  Although it devotes fourteen of its eighty pages just to the various crowns in the collection, it cannot carry the impact of walking into dark rooms with illuminated display cases filled with large sparkling items of gold and jewels.

The guidebook to the collection at the Tower of London tells visitors:

Kings of England had a crown for everyday use, and the coronation crown that was worn rarey but was the ultimate symbol of their sacred and regal authority. The crowns were accompanied by other symbols of power: a sceptre indicating control over the realm and royal rights; a rod representing the responsibility to protect the people; a decorated sword for military strength; and an orb; a globe representing the world with a cross on top symbolizing Christ’s power over all creation

The Crown Jewels include more than 23,000 gemstones and more than 100 objects. The value of the collection is placed as much as six BILLION dollars, although officially they are considered priceless. One diamond, the Cullinan, has an estimated value of $430 million

The collection says everything about the difference between our system of government and the English system of government.

These jewel-encrusted items are symbols intended to make it clear that power is separate from and far above the people, and that it is blessed by an official national church. Only three people are permitted to handle these treasurers—the King, the Royal Jewler, and the Archbishop of Canterbury.

Contrast those museums with a museum in this country that shows us the symbols of OUR system. We have one room displaying, not jewels but a few pages of paper:

—Four pieces of paper in particular.

The National Archives Museum in Washington, D. C. has rules about cameras, too.  Take them in.  Use them. Photograph the Declaration, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights.  Don’t use flash or other supplemental lighting, selfie sticks, monopods or similar equipment. But otherwise, snap away.

If you want real detailed images of the documents, you can download free scans of them, buy facsimiles in the museum store or online, or download closeups of the documents and other features in the rotunda. You can have the symbols of our government in your own home or your office. You don’t have to go hundreds of miles, get tickets, and stand in lines to see them. They belong to YOU. You do not belong to them.

The words of the documents describe the gulf between this country and the home country we left in 1776:

“When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands….”

We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union…..”

“The Conventions of a number of the States, having at the time of their adopting the Constitution, expressed a desire, in order to prevent misconstruction or abuse of its powers, that further declaratory and restrictive clauses should be added: and as extending the ground of public confidence in government, will best ensure the beneficent ends of its institution.”  

In darkened tight rooms of ancient buildings in London and Edinburgh are housed symbols that display the power of government OVER the people who are not allowed to even take photographs of those symbols

In the bright, light-filled rotunda of a public building in our country are the documents that describe the power of the PEOPLE over government.

We, the people of the United States, elect a President and two houses of a Congress that represents us. The people of the United Kingdom have little voice in picking those who will rule them.

The Constitutional Monarchy that is the United Kingdom considers the King, an inherited position, the head of state although not the head of government. Political decisions have been left to the government and Parliament since the Magna Carta but the people’s involvement is relatively minimal.

The top officer in the political system is the Prime Minister, who is not elected by the people. By tradition, the PM is a member of Parliament answerable to the House of Commons. The King has “Royal Prerogative powers” that include the power to appoint and dismiss the Prime Minister. However, it is customary that the Sovereign (King or Queen) appoints someone from the majority party in the House of Commons.

And the way those representatives of the people are elected seems by comparison to our elections to minimize the power of the voter.

The 650 members of the House of Commons are elected from districts in a “first past the post” system of voting that pits all candidates together regardless of party with the candidate getting the plurality, not necessarily the majority, winning the position.  The “first past the post” concept is likened to a horse race finish in a multiple horse field. Members of the House of Commons are called MPs, Members of Parliament.

The members of the House of Lords are not elected.  They are appointed and serve for life. The custom of people serving by inheritance was ended in 1999 but Lordships are determined by in-house elections. There is no fixed number of members and not all who are members are allowed to attend proceedings.  Last year there were 261 Conservative Party Lords, 185 Crossbench Lords, and 174 Labour Party members.  A year earlier, the total was 798 but only 755 could take part in the proceedings. As many as 26 members are bishops or archbishops of the national church.  The people have no voice in selecting members of the House of Lords..

We describe all of this, as far as we are capable of understanding it, given our background in our own form of government, to point out how distinctly different things are for us, and to underline how those dark rooms filled with billions of dollars of jewelry symbolize power that does NOT flow from the people but clearly reminds the people how superior the government is over them, how separate government power is from the consent of the governed.

Those rooms remind us that government of, by, and for the people is a concept that was stated in Philadelphia by traitor radicals who knew the personal danger they faced. Many have died to protect that traitorous system. Many have died in the country’s uniforms as well as in civilian attire on battlefields and in city streets to protect and expand that concept for everyone.

We left those darkened rooms in England and Scotland with even greater appreciation for being a citizen of a country that trusts the people to define governmental power. In doing so we are not criticizing the system that the people of our Mother Country have; we are only pointing out the differences with which both we Americans and our British cousins are comfortable having.

On this Independence Day, we need to ponder the power—and especially in this year the responsibility—we have to determine the kind of government we will allow and the kind of people we will choose to operate it on OUR behalf, not on THEIR behalf.

Symbolically, we are facing a choice between going to a dark place or staying in a place of light, of retaining the power of government that serves the people or giving it up to those who seek power to serve themselves.

We the people are the crown jewels of this country.

And this country is the crown jewel of freedom for the rest of the world.

Never, ever, forget that.

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Letting the Ashes Cool

(This post includes a lengthy addition.)

We thought it judicious to refrain from what many years ago was given the title of “instant analysis” after last Thursday night’s sad demonstration of the state of our major political parties. It was a dismaying performance from both sides—-dueling dumpster fires, if  you will.

It is hard to see that the debate allowed many voters to make their final presidential-support decisions.  It lived down to its expectations by presenting us with a seemingly doddering old man against a blustering congenital liar.  It demonstrated that our political parties truly are giving us a choice of the lesser of two evils.

(CNN calculates Trump out-shown Biden 30-9 in false statements and misleading claims. The network drew some criticism for not doing instant fact-checking during the debate, an impossibility given the volume of them. For the historical record, we are adding at the end of these comments the extensive fact-checking done by Daniel Dale and other staffers at CNN that addresses that issue.)

The debate was an example—indeed the entire contest is likely to be an example—of the dangers of political deference. Both parties long ago decided who would run for President this year.  The decision means that the emergence of fresh, incisive, inspirational new potential leadership has been discouraged for another cycle.  It is one thing to offer retreaded old warriors, but to stifle political vision necessary to confront a rapidly-changing world is something else entirely. And that is what is happening in both parties.

It is of little comfort, but some comfort, to know that this election cycle should be the end of a political era that has aged out.

We pretty well knew, or feared, what we were going to get last Thursday night.  One candidate is great with a teleprompter that keeps his thoughts organized and cogent. One candidate is at his best (or worst) when he goes off script, a teleprompter, poorly-read, never expressing his true attitudes.

President Biden appeared, if anything, to be overly-prepared to make his points.  Ex-President Trump appeared to be prepared to be his usual self. Biden at times appeared frail and vacant.  Trump was verbose in his lying and demonstrated a third-grader’s ability to make faces when Biden was speaking. When things degenerated so far that they argued over their golf games, it was clear this event was in the toilet.

Even during the event, and in the hours and days immediately afterward, Democrats seem to be personifying the saying attributable to several people:

“When in danger or in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout.”

MAGA Republicans are celebrating; mainline Republicans continue shaking their heads. In truth, neither party should consider anything is final.

We are more than four months away from the election, a long, long time in politics.

At least one more debate is scheduled.

Two political convention/patent medicine tent shows/infomercials are yet to be held.

Hundreds of millions of dollars are yet to be spent on thirty-second messages, direct mail pieces, social media blasts, etc., all of which are designed to manipulate the public.

The President’s health and mental acuity remains an issue.  The ex-president’s civil and criminal record is still being built, with a criminal sentencing coming up just before his convention. Both parties would do well to have a Plan B in case either candidate is taken out of or falls out of the race.

It was observed many years ago that Ronald Reagan’s most important ingredient in building his legacy was that he surrounded himself with good people.  He was never accused of being the intellectual equal of, say, John Kennedy or of nuclear submarine officer Jimmy Carter. But his advisers played a major role in his administration’s policies.

So it is that during this long, intensive public job interview that we observers and interviewers ask ourselves not to focus as much as we are inclined to and encouraged to focus on the individual candidates  but to view their administrations in a holistic manner.  Who will their advisers be?

We should recall the story is told of Billy, the operator of a little barge operator in New York who, at the end of each day, would return to his dock, bringing with him some of the harbor garbage that had collected around his boat. Look at our candidates and think of the story of Billy’s barge. Who and what will they bring with them to the White House?

Last Thursday night was no prize-winner for either side. But there are months to go and many harbors to visit.

Both sides have ample reasons for concerns and numerous questions about whether either candidate should still be around at the end.

Recognize danger and doubt.  But running in circles, screaming and shouting, whether in seeming triumph or seeming disaster, on either side appears to be premature.

-0-

Now, the analysis:

Trump made more than 30 false claims during CNN’s presidential debate — far more than Biden

By CNN Staff

Updated 1:47 PM EDT, Fri June 28, 2024

Both President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump made false and misleading claims during CNN’s presidential debate on Thursday – but Trump did so far more than Biden, just like in their debates in 2020.

Trump made more than 30 false claims at the Thursday debate. They included numerous claims that CNN and others have already debunked during the current presidential campaign or prior.

Trump’s repeat falsehoods included his assertions that some Democratic-led states allow babies to be executed after birth, that every legal scholar and everybody in general wanted Roe v. Wade overturned, that there were no terror attacks during his presidency, that Iran didn’t fund terror groups during his presidency, that the US has provided more aid to Ukraine than Europe has, that Biden for years referred to Black people as “super predators,” that Biden is planning to quadruple people’s taxes, that then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi turned down 10,000 National Guard troops for the US Capitol on January 6, 2021that Americans don’t pay the cost of his tariffs on China and other countries, that Europe accepts no American cars, that he is the president who got the Veterans Choice program through Congress, and that fraud marred the results of the 2020 election.

Trump also added some new false claims, such as his assertions that the US currently has its biggest budget deficit and its biggest trade deficit with China. Both records actually occurred under Trump.

Biden made at least nine false or misleading claims in the debate. He used false numbers while describing two of his key Medicare policies, falsely claimed that no US troops had been killed on his watch, repeated his usual misleading figure about billionaires’ tax rates, baselessly claimed that Trump wants to eliminate Social Security, falsely said that the unemployment rate was 15% when he took office, inaccurately said that the Border Patrol union had endorsed him before clarifying that he was talking about agents’ support for the border bill he had backed, and exaggerated Trump’s 2020 comments about the possibility of treating Covid-19 by injecting disinfectant.

Here is a detailed fact check from CNN’s reporting team of some of those claims.

Trump on abortion policy after Roe v. Wade

Trump repeated his frequent claim that “everybody” wanted Roe v. Wade overturned and the power to set abortion policy returned to individual states. He said: “Everybody wanted to get it back to the states, everybody, without exception: Democrats, Republicans, liberals, conservatives. Everybody wanted it back. Religious leaders.” He also added: “ Every legal scholar wanted it that way.”

Facts First: Trump’s claims arefalse. Poll after poll has shown that most Americans – two-thirds or nearly two-thirds of respondents in multiple polls – wish Roe would have been preserved. And multiple legal scholars have told CNN that they had wanted Roe preserved.

A CNN poll conducted by SSRS in April 2024 found 65% of adults opposed the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe. That’s nearly identical to the result of a CNN poll conducted by SSRS in July 2022, the month after the decision. Similarly, a Marquette Law School poll in February 2024 found 67% of adults opposed the decision that overturned Roe.

NBC News poll in June 2023 found 61% opposition among registered voters to the decision that overturned Roe. A Gallup poll in May 2023 found 61% of adults called the decision a bad thing.

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And “any claim that all legal scholars wanted Roe overturned is mind-numbingly false,” Rutgers Law School professor Kimberly Mutcherson, a legal scholar who supported the preservation of Roe, said in April.

“Donald Trump’s claim is flatly incorrect,” another legal scholar who did not want Roe overturned, Maya Manian, an American University law professor and faculty director of the university’s Health Law and Policy Program, said in April.

Trump’s claim is “obviously not” true, said Mary Ziegler, a law professor at the University of California, Davis, who is an expert on the history of the US abortion debate. Ziegler, who also did not want Roe overturned, said in an April interview: “Most legal scholars probably track most Americans, who didn’t want to overturn Roe. … It wasn’t as if legal scholars were somehow outliers.”

It is true that some legal scholars who support abortion rights wished that Roe had been written differently; the late liberal Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was one of them. But Ziegler noted that although “there was a cottage industry of legal scholars kind of rewriting Roe – ‘what Roe should’ve said’ — that isn’t saying Roe should’ve been overturned. Those are very different things.”

From CNN’s Daniel Dale

Trump on Democrats and abortion

Trump repeated his frequent claim that Democrats will kill babies in the “eighth month, the ninth month of pregnancy, or even after birth.” After Biden said that he would “restore Roe v. Wade” if reelected, Trump said, “So that means he can take the life of the baby in the ninth month and even after birth, because some states – Democrat-run – take it after birth.”Trump pointed to the former Virginia governor’s support of a bill that would loosen restrictions on late-term abortions as an example.

Trump also said later in the debate that some “Democrat-run” states allow babies to be killed after birth.

Facts FirstTrump’s claim about Democrats killing babies after birth is nonsense; that is infanticide and illegal in all 50 states. A very small percentage of abortions happen at or after 21 weeks of pregnancy. 

According to data published by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, just 0.9% of reported abortions in 2020 occurred at 21 weeks or later. (Many of these abortions occur because of serious health risks or lethal fetal anomalies.) By contrast, 80.9% of reported abortions in 2020 were conducted before 10 weeks, 93.1% before 14 weeks and 95.8% before 16 weeks.

Trump invoked controversial comments made in 2019 by Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam, a Democrat, as he voiced support for a state measure that would significantly loosen restrictions on late-term abortions when the fetus was not viable. Northam was not talking about infanticide, which Virginia continues to prohibit.

There are some cases in which parents decide to choose palliative care for babies who are born with deadly conditions that give them just minutes, hours or days to live. That is simply not the same as killing a baby.

From CNN’s Daniel Dale and Jen Christensen

Trump on the ‘suckers’ and ‘losers’ controversy  

Trump denied that he had used the words “suckers” or “losers” to describe members of the US military who had been killed in action, after Biden pointed to the remarks to criticize his predecessor’s record on supporting veterans. And he claimed that the idea he had made these remarks was “made up by him,” Biden.

Facts First: Trump’s claim that Biden made up this story is false. The story was initially reported by The Atlantic. The magazine, citing four unnamed sources with “firsthand knowledge,” reported in 2020 that on the day Trump canceled a visit to a military cemetery in France where US troops who were killed in World War I are buried, he had told members of his senior staff, “Why should I go to that cemetery? It’s filled with losers.” The magazine also reported that in another conversation on the same trip, Trump had referred to marines who had been killed in the region as “suckers.” 

John Kelly, who served as Trump’s White House chief of staff and secretary of Homeland Security, has said on the record that in 2018 Trump did use the words “suckers” and “losers” to refer to servicemembers who were killed in action. Kelly told CNN anchor Jim Sciutto for Sciutto’s 2024 book that Trump would say: “Why do you people all say that these guys who get wounded or killed are heroes? They’re suckers for going in the first place, and they’re losers.”

There is no public recording of Trump making such remarks, so we can’t definitively call Trump’s denial false. But it wasn’t Biden’s invention.

From CNN’s Daniel Dale and Kaanita Iyer 

Biden on his record as commander-in-chief

Biden claimed that he is the only president this decade “that doesn’t have any … troops dying anywhere in the world, like he did,” referring to Trump.

“Truth is, I’m the only president this century, that doesn’t have any, this decade, that doesn’t have any troops dying anywhere in the world, like he did,” Biden said.

Facts First: Biden is wrong. US service members have died abroad during his presidency, including 13 troops killed in a suicide bombing during the US withdrawal from Afghanistan.

Thirteen US service members — including 11 Marines, one Army special operations soldier, and one Navy corpsman — were killed in the suicide bombing at the Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul. Three US soldiers were also killed this year at a small US outpost in Jordan in a one-way drone attack launched by Iran-backed militants. And two US Navy SEALs died in January off the coast of Somalia while conducting a night-time seizure of lethal aid being transported from Iran to Yemen.

Other US service members have also died abroad in training incidents, including five US soldiers who died in a helicopter crash in the eastern Mediterranean Sea in November 2023 during a routine refueling mission, and eight US airmen who died in a CV-22 Osprey crash in November 2023 off the coast of Yakushima Island, Japan.

From CNN’s Haley Britzky

Trump on Biden and the term “super predators”

Trump claimed that Biden called Black people “super predators” for a decade in the 1990s.

“What he’s done to the Black population is horrible, including the fact that for 10 years he called them ‘super predators’ – in the 1990s – we can’t forget that,” Trump said.

Facts First: Trump’s claim is false. Biden never publicly deployed the phrase “super predators” or endorsed the criminological theory behind it (which held that there was a new breed of highly and remorselessly violent young offenders), let alone do so for 10 years. Biden did refer to “predators on our streets” who were “beyond the pale” while promoting the 1994 crime bill, but he did not specify that he was talking about people of any particular race.

As reported by CNN’s KFILE in 2019, Biden said in a 1993 Senate floor speech in support of the crime bill that “we have predators on our streets that society has in fact, in part because of its neglect, created.” And he urged the government to focus on the people he said were in danger of becoming “the predators 15 years from now” if their lives weren’t changed – “the cadre of young people, tens of thousands of them, born out of wedlock, without parents, without supervision, without any structure, without any conscience developing because they literally … have not been socialized, they literally have not had an opportunity.”

But Biden did not speak of “super predators.”

Four years later, in a 1997 hearing, he noted that the vast majority of youth criminal cases involved nonviolent offenses and said, “When we talk about the juvenile justice system, we have to remember that most of the youth involved in the system are not the so-called super predators.”

It was Trump’s opponent in the 2016 presidential election, Hillary Clinton, who affirmatively used the phrase “super predators” as she argued in support of the 1994 crime bill (in 1996). She said in 2016 that she shouldn’t have used that language.

Trump wrote in a 2000 book that he supported tougher sentencing and street policing and warned of “wolf packs” of young criminals roaming the streets – and he cited a since-discredited statistical analysis that was linked to the “super predator” theory.

From CNN’s Holmes Lybrand and Daniel Dale

Trump on Iran’s funding for Hamas and Hezbollah 

Trump claimed that when he was president, Iran “had no money for Hamas” and no money “for terror.”

“Do you wanna know why? Because Iran was broke with me. I wouldn’t let anybody do business with them. They ran out of money. They were broke,” he said. “They had no money for Hamas, they had no money for anything. No money for terror. That’s why you had no terror, at all, during my administration. This place, the whole world is blowing up under him.” He added later that Iran also had “no money” for Hezbollah.

Facts First: Trump’s claims that Iran had “no money for Hamas,” “no money for terror” and no money for Hezbollah during his presidency is false. Iran’s funding for such groups did decline in the second half of his presidency, in large part because his sanctions on the country had a major negative impact on the Iranian economy, but the funding never stopped entirely, as four experts told CNN earlier this month.  

Trump’s own administration said in 2020 that Iran was continuing to fund terror groups including Hezbollah. The Trump administration began imposing sanctions on Iran in late 2018, pursuing a campaign known as “maximum pressure.” But Trump-appointed Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said himself in 2020 that Iran was continuing to fund terror groups. “So you continue to have, in spite of the Iranian leadership demanding that more money be given to them, they are using the resources that they have to continue funding Hezbollah in Lebanon and threatening the state of Israel, funding Iraqi terrorist Shia groups, all the things that they have done historically – continuing to build out their capabilities even while the people inside of their own country are suffering,” Pompeo said in a May 2020 interview, according to a transcript posted on the State Department’s website.

Trump could have fairly said that his sanctions on Iran had made life more difficult for terror groups (though it’s unclear how much their operations were affected). Instead, he continued his years-old practice of exaggerating even legitimate achievements.

From CNN’s Daniel Dale

Biden on drug prices

Biden touted two measures that his administration and congressional Democrats have enacted to reduce drug prices.

“We brought down the price of prescription drugs, which is a major issue for many people, to $15 for a insulin shot as opposed to $400. No senior has to pay more than $200 for any drug … beginning next year,” Biden said.

Facts First: Biden is wrong. He incorrectly described two key provisions of the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act that aim to reduce prescription drug costs for Medicare beneficiaries.

Under the law, Medicare enrollees don’t pay more than $35 a month for each insulin prescription.

The law also placed a cap on Medicare’s Part D drug plans so that seniors and people with disabilities won’t pay more than $2,000 a year in out-of-pocket costs for medications bought at the pharmacy, starting in 2025. Biden corrected himself later in the debate to use the $2,000 figure when talking about the cap on those out-of-pocket costs.

From CNN’s Tami Luhby

Biden on border crossings dropping during his administration 

Biden said border crossings had dropped 40% since he took executive action to tighten the border in early June, arguing that the numbers are better than when Trump left office.

“What I’ve done since I changed the law, what’s happened? I’ve changed it in a way that now you’re in situation where there are 40% fewer people coming across the border illegally,” Biden said.

Facts First: This is misleading.

The number of daily encounters at the US southern border dropped 40% following Biden’s executive action restricting asylum access earlier this month. While there’s been a recent drop in border crossings, the number of people crossing the US-Mexico border was generally lower during the Trump administration.

From CNN’s Priscilla Alvarez

Biden on support from the Border Patrol union

Biden said the Border Patrol union endorsed him, and then appeared to clarify and said the group “endorsed (his) position.”

Facts FirstThis is misleading. The National Border Patrol Council, the union that represents Border Patrol agents, backed a bipartisan border deal reached by senators that included some of the toughest security measures in recent memory, but didn’t endorse Biden. The deal failed in the Senate.

In a post on X, the union swiftly responded to the president Thursday: “To be clear, we never have and never will endorse Biden.”

From CNN’s Priscilla Alvarez

Trump on the National Guard in Minneapolis 

Trump said that he deployed the National Guard to Minneapolis in 2020 during the unrest that followed the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer.

“When they ripped down Portland, when they ripped down many other cities. You go to Minnesota, Minneapolis, what they’ve done there with the fires all over the city – if I didn’t bring in the National Guard, that city would have been destroyed.”

Facts First: This is false. Minnesota Democratic Gov. Tim Walz, not Trump, deployed the Minnesota National Guard during the 2020 unrest; Walz first activated the Guard more than seven hours before Trump publicly threatened to deploy the Guard himself. Walz’s office told CNN in 2020 that the governor activated the Guard in response to requests from officials in Minneapolis and St. Paul – cities also run by Democrats. 

You can read more here.

From CNN’s Holmes Lybrand and Daniel Dale

Trump on the European Union’s trade practices 

Trump, complaining about the European Union’s trade practices, claimed that the EU doesn’t accept US products, including American cars. “They don’t want anything that we have,” Trump said Thursday. “But we’re supposed to take their cars, their food, their everything, their agriculture.”

Facts FirstIt’s not true that the European Union won’t take American products, including American cars, though some US exports do face EU trade barriers and though US automakers have often had a hard time gaining popularity with European consumers.

The US exported about $368 billion in goods to the European Union in 2023 (while importing about $576 billion from the EU that year), federal figures show. According to a December 2023 report from the European Automobile Manufacturers’ Association, the EU is the second-largest market for US vehicle exports — importing 271,476 US vehicles in 2022, valued at nearly 9 billion euro. (Some of these are vehicles made by European automakers at plants in the US.) The EU’s Eurostat statistical office says that car imports from the US hit a new peak in 2020, Trump’s last full year in office, at a value of about 11 billion euro.

From CNN’s Daniel Dale and Ella Nilsen 

Biden on Black unemployment 

Biden attempted to contrast himself with Trump on the economy. He said, “Black unemployment is the lowest level it’s been in a long, long time.”

Facts FirstThis is false. While the Black or African American unemployment rate hit a record low under Biden in April 2023, 4.8%, the rate was up to 6.1% in May 2024 – higher than in eight months of the Trump presidency.

From CNN’s Daniel Dale and Kaanita Iyer  

Trump on job growth during Biden’s presidency 

Trump said of President Biden, “The only jobs he created were for illegal immigrants and ‘bounce-back jobs,’ a bounce-back from the Covid.”

Facts First: Trump’s claims that the job growth during Biden’s presidency has been all “bounce-back” gains where people went back to their old jobs is not fully correct.

Nearly 22 million jobs were lost under Trump in March and April 2020 when the global economy cratered on account of the pandemic. Following substantial relief and recovery measures, the US started regaining jobs immediately, adding more than 12 million jobs from May 2020 through December 2020, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data.

The recovery continued after Biden took office, with the US reaching and surpassing its pre-pandemic (February 2020) employment totals in June 2022.

The job gains didn’t stop there. Since June 2022, the US has added nearly 6.2 million more jobs in what’s become the fifth-longest period of employment expansion on record. In total under Biden, 15.6 million jobs have been added.

But it’s not entirely fair nor accurate to say the jobs gained were all “bounce-back” or were people simply returning to their former positions.

The pandemic drastically reshaped the employment landscape. For one, a significant portion of the labor force did not return due to early retirements, deaths, long Covid or caregiving responsibilities.

Additionally, because of shifts in consumer spending patterns as well as health-and-safety implications, public-facing industries could not fully reopen or restaff immediately. Some of those workers found jobs in other industries or used the opportunity to start their own businesses.

When the pandemic was more under control and in-person activities could fully resume, those industries faced worker shortages.

The pandemic recovery included what’s been called the Great Resignation or the Great Reshuffling, where people – for a variety of reasons – switched jobs or careers.

From CNN’s Alicia Wallace

Trump on the Paris climate accord 

Trump claimed that the Paris climate accord would have cost the US $1 trillion, that it was the only country that had to pay, and that China, India and Russia weren’t paying. Trump called the accord “a rip-off of the United States.”

Facts First: Trump’s claim that the US would alone have had to pay $1 trillion as part of the Paris climate accord is wildly inflated.

As part of the Paris agreement, in 2009, the US and other developed nations, including Western European countries, committed to collectively contribute $100 billion per year by 2020 to help poorer, developing countries, predominantly in the Global South, adapt to the impacts of climate change like sea level rise and worsening heat. Developed nations met their collective goal two years late in 2022, but the figure has never been as high as Trump was suggesting – and the US has certainly never paid $1 trillion in international climate finance.

Under the Obama administration, the US paid $1 billion of a $3 billion commitment it originally made in 2014. After Trump pulled the country out of the Paris accord, the US paid nothing to the global finance goal. And while Biden pledged $11.4 billion annually from the US, this level of funding hasn’t materialized. That’s because Congress, responsible for appropriating the nation’s budget, has allocated only a fraction of that – roughly $1 billion in 2022.

Trump is correct that countries including China, India and Russia have thus far not contributed to international climate finance. However, China’s position as the largest global emitter means many countries are pressuring it to contribute to international climate finance through a formal process.

From CNN’s Ella Nilsen 

Trump on Biden and a Ukrainian prosecutor 

Trump brought up an anti-Biden lie about Ukraine that has been a mainstay of both the 2020 and 2024 presidential cycles, plus Trump’s 2019 impeachment.

Trump slammed Biden for supposedly “telling the Ukrainian people” to “change the prosecutor, otherwise, you’re not getting $1 billion,” referring to Biden’s efforts to remove Ukraine’s top prosecutor in 2016. Trump also claimed the Ukrainian prosecutor’s ouster was related to Biden’s “son,” referencing Hunter Biden, who at the time was on the board for a prominent Ukrainian energy company.

“If I ever said that, that’s quid pro quo,” Trump quipped.

Facts First: Trump’s claims are false. 

Since 2019, Trump and his Republican allies have falsely accused Biden of abusing his powers while serving as vice president to get a top Ukrainian prosecutor fired, supposedly because the prosecutor’s probe into the Ukrainian energy giant Burisma Holdings threatened his son, Hunter Biden.

This claim was never true and has been repeatedly debunked. Nonetheless, it is one of the most-cited talking points used by Republicans against Biden during any discussion about his ties to Ukraine.

In reality, Biden’s actions toward the prosecutor were consistent with bipartisan US policy, and was in lockstep with what America’s European allies were pushing for at the time. They sought to remove the prosecutor because he wasn’t doing enough to crack down on corruption in Ukraine – including at Burisma.

The Obama administration, career US diplomats, US allies, the International Monetary Fund and Ukrainian anti-corruption activists, and even Senate Republicans, among others, all made clear that they were displeased with the performance of Viktor Shokin, who became Ukraine’s prosecutor general in 2015.

It is not clear how aggressively Shokin was investigating Burisma or its oligarch owner – or if there was even an active investigation – at the time that Joe Biden successfully pushed for Shokin’s firing in 2016.

During the 2020 presidential campaign, Senate Republicans led a probe to find evidence on whether Biden abused his position to help his family financially, but came up empty. As the 2024 campaign approached, House Republicans put these false claims at the center of their now-flatlined impeachment inquiry into Biden.

From CNN’s Marshall Cohen

Trump on tariffs 

Trump claimed that his proposal to impose a 10% tariff on all goods coming into the US would not raise prices on Americans and instead cost other countries.

“It’s just going to cost countries that have been ripping us off for years, like China, and many others,” Trump said.

Facts First: This is false. Study after study including one from the federal government’s bipartisan US International Trade Commission(USITC), have shown that American consumers and industries bear almost the entire cost of US tariffs, including those duties previously imposed by Trump.

When the US puts a tariff on an imported good, the cost of the tariff comes directly out of the bank account of an American importer when the foreign-made product arrives at a US port. It’s possible that some foreign manufacturers lowered their prices to stay competitive in the US market after Trump raised tariffs – but not enough to keep the cost paid by American importers the same as before.

As of June 12, American importers have paid more than $240 billion for tariffs that Trump imposed – and Biden mostly left in place – on imported solar panels, steel, aluminum, and Chinese-made goods, according to US Customs and Border Protection. The USITC found that US importers, on average between 2018 and 2021, ended up paying nearly the full cost of the tariffs because import prices increased at the same rate as the tariffs. For each 1% increase in the tariff rate, the price paid by the American importer also went up 1%.

Once an importing company pays the tariff, it can decide to eat the cost or pass all or some of it to the buyer of its goods – whether that’s a retailer or a consumer. For example, American shoe seller Deer Stags, which imports most of its product line from China, decided to do a little bit of both.

It was harder to get customers to pay more for existing styles that Deer Stags had carried for a long time, company president Rick Muskat told CNN.So the company ended up eating the cost of the tariffs placed on some older styles and charging more for some new items.

Economists generally agree that tariffs drive up prices . The Peterson Institute for International Economics recently estimated that Trump’s proposed 10% across-the-board tariff, together with his proposal to impose a 60% tariff on all imports from China, would cost the typical middle-income household at least $1,700 a year. And JP Morgan economists estimated in 2019 that the tariffs Trump imposed on about $300 billion of Chinese-made goods would cost the average American household $1,000 a year.

From CNN’s Katie Lobosco 

Trump on his criminal cases

Trump repeated his frequent claims that Biden and his Justice Department were behind Trump’s four indictments, including the Manhattan hush money case in which Trump was convicted on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records.

“He indicted me because I was his opponent,” Trump said of Biden.

Of the Manhattan conviction, Trump said: “That was a case that was started and moved. They moved a high-ranking official at DOJ into the Manhattan DA’s office to start that case.”

Facts FirstThere is no evidence supporting either of Trump’s claims.

Grand juries made up of ordinary citizens – in New York, Georgia, Florida and Washington, DC – approved the indictments in each of Trump’s criminal cases. There is no basis for the claim that Biden ordered Trump to be criminally charged or face civil trials.

There is also no evidence that Biden or the federal Justice Department had any role in launching or running Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s prosecution – and Bragg, a Democrat, is a locally elected official who does not report to the federal government. The indictment in the case was approved by a grand jury of ordinary citizens.

Trump’s two federal indictments were brought by a special counsel, Jack Smith. Smith was appointed in November 2022 by Attorney General Merrick Garland, a Biden appointee, but that is not proof that Biden was involved in the prosecution effort, much less that Biden personally ordered the indictments. Garland has said that he would resign if Biden ever asked him to act against Trump but that he was sure that would never happen.

As he did during the debate, Trump has repeatedly invoked a lawyer on Bragg’s team, Matthew Colangelo, while making claims about the Justice Department’s involvement in the New York case. Colangelo left the Justice Department in 2022 to join the district attorney’s office as senior counsel to Bragg. But there is no evidence that Biden had anything to do with Colangelo’s employment decision. Colangelo and Bragg had been colleagues before Bragg was elected Manhattan district attorney in 2021.

Before Colangelo worked at the Justice Department, he and Bragg worked at the same time in the office of New York’s state attorney general, where Colangelo investigated Trump’s charity and financial practices and was involved in bringing various lawsuits against the Trump administration.

Trump on other countries doing business with Iran during his presidency 

Trump claimed that China, among other countries, “passed” on doing business with Iran during his presidency after he vowed that the US would not do business with any country that does so.

“Iran was broke. Anybody that did business with Iran, including China, they couldn’t do business with the United States. They all passed,” Trump said.

Facts First: This is false.

China’s oil imports from Iran did briefly plummet under Trump in 2019, the year his administration made a concerted effort to deter such purchases, but they never stopped – and then they rose sharply again while Trump was still president.

“The claim is untrue because Chinese crude imports from Iran haven’t stopped at all,” Matt Smith, lead oil analyst for the Americas at Kpler, a market intelligence firm, told CNN in November.

China’s official statistics recorded no purchases of Iranian crude in Trump’s last partial month in office, January 2021, and none in most of Biden’s first year in office. But that doesn’t mean China’s imports ceased; industry experts say it is widely known that China has used a variety of tactics to mask its continued imports from Iran.

Smith said Iranian crude is often listed in Chinese data as being from Malaysia; ships may travel from Iran with their transponders switched off and then turn them on when they are near Malaysia, Smith said, or they may transfer the Iranian oil to other ships.

Ali Vaez, Iran project director at the International Crisis Group, said in a November email: “China significantly reduced its imports from Iran from around 800,000 barrels per day in 2018 to 100,000 in late 2019. But by the time Trump left office, they were back to upwards to 600(000)-700,000 barrels.”

Vaez’s comments were corroborated by Kpler data Smith provided to CNN. Kpler found that China imported about 511,000 barrels per day of Iranian crude in December 2020, Trump’s last full month in office. The low point under Trump was March 2020, when global oil demand crashed because of Covid-19. Even then, China imported about 87,000 barrels per day, Kpler found. (Since data on Iranian oil exports is based on cargo tracking by various companies and groups, other entities may have different data.)

From CNN’s Daniel Dale and Kaanita Iyer 

Trump on the impact of immigration on Medicare and Social Security

Trump said at least twice during the debate that Biden will destroy Social Security and Medicare by putting migrants entering the US on the benefits.

“These millions and millions of people coming in, they’re trying to put them on Social Security. He will wipe out Social Security. He will wipe out Medicare,” Trump said.

Facts First: Trump is wrong. In fact, the opposite is true, particularly in the near term, multiple experts say. Many undocumented immigrants work, which means they pay much-needed payroll taxes, and this bolsters the Social Security and Medicare trust funds and extends their solvency. Immigrantswho are working legally typically won’t collect benefits for many years. As for those who are undocumented, some are working under fake Social Security numbers, so they are paying payroll taxes but don’t qualify to collect benefits.

The Social Security Administration looked at the effects of unauthorized immigration on the Social Security trust funds. It found that in 2010, earnings by unauthorized workers contributed roughly $12 billion on net to the entitlement program’s cash flow. The agency has not updated the analysis since, but this year’s Social Security trustees report noted that increasing average annual total net immigration by 100,000 persons improves the entitlement program’s solvency.

“We estimate that future years will experience a continuation of this positive impact on the trust funds,” said the report on unauthorized immigration.

Meanwhile, unauthorized immigrants contributed more than $35 billion on net to Medicare’s trust fund between 2000 and 2011, extending the life of the trust fund by a year, according to a study published in the Journal of General Internal Medicine.

“Immigrants tend to be younger and employed, which increases the number of workers paying into the system,” said Gary Engelhardt, a Syracuse University economics professor. “Also, they have more children, which helps boost the future workforce that will pay payroll taxes.”

“Immigrants are good for Social Security,” he said.

However, undocumented immigrants who gain legal status that includes eligibility for future Social Security and Medicare benefits could ultimately be a drain to the system, according to Jason Richwine, a resident scholar at the Center for Immigration Studies, which advocates for lower immigration.

“Illegal immigration unambiguously benefits the Social Security and Medicare trust funds, but amnesty (legalization) would reverse those gains and add extra costs,” Richwine wrote in a report last year.

From CNN’s Tami Luhby

Trump on the 2020 election 

Trump reiterated election lies, claiming that he didn’t accept the results of the 2020 election because of voter fraud.

“I would’ve much rather accepted these, but the fraud and everything else was ridiculous,” Trump said.

Facts First: Trump’s election claims remain false.

The 2020 election was not rigged or stolen, Trump lost fair and square to Biden by an Electoral College margin of 306 to 232, his opponents did not cheat, and there is no evidence of any fraud even close to widespread enough to have changed the outcome in any state.

From CNN’s Daniel Dale and Kaanita Iyer 

Trump on his own comments after 2017 Charlottesville march 

Biden denounced Trump for saying in August 2017 that “very fine people” were among the participants in a hateful “Unite the Right” event days prior in Charlottesville, Virginia. The event was organized by White nationalists after the city decided to remove a statue of Confederate general Robert E. Lee from a park. The participants included neo-Nazis, one of whom murdered a counter-protester, and prominent public racists.

But Trump claimed that Biden’s recall of his remark was “made up” and a “nonsense story.”

Facts First: Trump’s claim that Biden’s description of his comments is a “nonsense story” is itself false. Biden fairly characterized Trump’s comments about the events in Charlottesville.

The claim that Trump’s “fine people” comment is a “hoax” and “nonsense story” is based on the inaccurate premise that there were peaceful non-racists attending an aggressively hateful marchthat was held in Charlottesville the night before the main daytime protest that featured prominent White nationalists as advertised speakers.

And supporters of the “hoax” claim have noted that, when Trump told reporters days later that “you also had people that were very fine people, on both sides,” he had also said “I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists, because they should be condemned totally” – and had specified that he was talking about other unnamed people he claimed had been at the nighttime march “protesting very quietly the taking down of the statue of Robert E. Lee.”

But there has never been evidence that such a benign group was present at the march. The march – which testimony in a 2021 civil trial showed was organized by White nationalists – was a bigoted gathering at which participants chanted Nazi and White nationalist slogans targeting Jews and others, and displayed Nazi symbols, while carrying Tiki torches.

CNN correspondent Elle Reeve, who has extensively reported on the Charlottesville gathering, noted that the torch march was organized quietly in White nationalist “alt-right” online spaces and intended to be a surprise event that was known in advance only to a select group of like-minded people.

So, it’s not clear how people who were not supportive of White nationalism might have come to be part of the crowd or why such people would have remained there if they had somehow stumbled in. And Trump has never identified any non-racists who participated.

From CNN’s Daniel Dale and Chandelis Duster 

Trump on the United States’ trade deficit with China 

Trump claimed that under Biden, “We have the largest deficit with China.”

Facts First: This is false. Even if you only count trade in goods and ignore the services trade – in which the US traditionally runs a surplus with China – the deficit with China fell to about $279 billion in 2023, the lowest since 2010. 

In 2018, under Trump, the goods deficit with China hit a new record of about $418 billion before falling back under $400 billion in subsequent years.

From CNN’s Katie Lobosco 

Trump on terror attacks during his administration

In discussing the Middle East and Hamas’ October 7 attack on Israel, Trump claimed that there was “no terror at all during my administration.”

Facts First: Trump’s claim is false, and it remains false even if he was referring specifically to attacks by Islamic extremists. There were various terrorist attacks during the Trump presidency. In fact, in his State of the Union address in 2018, Trump blamed immigration policies for “two terrorist attacks in New York” in “recent weeks.” 

Trump’s own Justice Department alleged that a mass murder in New York City in 2017, which killed eight people and injured others, was a terrorist attack carried out in support of ISIS; Trump repeatedly lamented this attack during his presidency. Trump’s Justice Department also alleged that a 2019 attack by an extremist member of Saudi Arabia’s military, which killed three US servicemembers and injured others at a military base in Florida, “was motivated by jihadist ideology” and was carried out by a longtime “associate” of al Qaeda.

In addition, there were a variety of other terrorist attacks during Trump’s presidency. Notably, Trump’s Justice Department said it was a “domestic terrorist attack” when one of Trump’s supporters mailed improvised explosive devices to CNN, prominent Democratic officials and other people in 2018. In 2019, a White supremacist pleaded guilty to multiple charges in New York, including first-degree murder in furtherance of an act of terrorism, for killing a Black man in March 2017 to try to start a race war. And Trump’s Justice Department described a 2019 shooting massacre at a Walmart in Texas as an act of domestic terrorism; the gunman who killed 23 people was targeting Latinos.

From CNN’s Holmes Lybrand and Daniel Dale

Trump on his tax cuts

Trump once again claimed that the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act was the biggest tax cut ever.

“I gave you the largest tax cut in history,” Trump said.

Facts First: Trump is wrong. Analyses have found that the act was not the largest in history either in percentage of gross domestic product or inflation-adjusted dollars.

The act made numerous permanent and temporary changes to the tax code, including reducing both corporate and individual income tax rates.

In a report released earlier this month, the Congressional Budget Office looked at the size of past tax cuts enacted between 1981 and 2023. It found that two other tax cut bills have been bigger – former President Ronald Reagan’s 1981 package and legislation signed by former President Barack Obama that extended earlier tax cuts enacted during former President George W. Bush’s administration.

The CBO measured the sizes of tax cuts by looking at the revenue effects of the bills as a percentage of gross domestic product – in other words, how much federal revenue the bill cuts as a portion of the economy – over five years. Reagan’s 1981 tax cut and Obama’s 2012 tax cut extension were 3.5% and 1.7% of GDP, respectively.

Trump’s 2017 tax cut, by contrast, was estimated to be about 1% of GDP.

The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget found in 2017 that the framework for the tax cuts would be the fourth largest since 1940 in inflation-adjusted dollars and the eighth largest since 1918 as a percentage of gross domestic product.

From CNN’s Tami Luhby

Trump on his own comments on January 6

In response to a question about his actions – and inaction – on January 6, 2021, while his supporters stormed the US Capitol, Trump defended the incendiary speech he delivered before the attack.

“I said, ‘Peacefully and patriotically,’” Trump said.

Facts First: This is highly misleading. He did say those words during his speech on the Ellipse on January 6, but he also told his supporters that they “wouldn’t have a country anymore” if they didn’t march to the US Capitol and “fight like hell” against a “rigged” election.

CNN has previously fact-checked this self-serving quotation from Trump about his January 6 speech.

During his speech, Trump said, “I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.”

But on the debate stage Thursday night, Trump omitted the fact that later in his January 6 speech, he told his supporters to “walk down Pennsylvania Avenue” to give GOP lawmakers the “boldness that they need to take back our country.” He also told the crowd at the Ellipse, “If you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore” and encouraged Republican lawmakers to stop fighting like a boxer “with his hands tied behind his back.”

Last year, a civil court in Colorado, and the Colorado Supreme Court, closely examined Trump’s speech as part of a lawsuit that tried to disqualify him from office under the 14th Amendment’s “insurrectionist ban.”

The Colorado trial judge concluded that “while Trump’s Ellipse speech did mention ‘peaceful’ conduct in his command to march to the Capitol, the overall tenor was that to save the democracy and the country the attendees needed to fight.”

From CNN’s Marshall Cohen  

Trump on abortion medication

Trump claimed, “The Supreme Court just approved the abortion pill.”

Facts FirstTrump’s claim about the abortion drug is false. The Supreme Court did not rule on the merits of the case and approve mifepristone, one of the pills used in a medication abortion. It sent the case back to the lower courts for additional proceedings.

The court earlier this month rejected a lawsuit that challenged the US Food and Drug Administration’s approach to regulating mifepristone.

The court did not “approve” the drug, as Trump claimed; instead it ruled that the doctors and the anti-abortion groups that had challenged access to the drug did not have the standing to sue. The reasoning of the court in this decision, scholars say, could encourage other mifepristone challenges in the future.

Medication abortion is now the most common method of abortion in the United States, according to the Guttmacher Institute. Nearly two-thirds of all abortions in the formal US health care system – about 63% – were medication abortions in 2023.

From CNN’s Jen Christensen

Trump on Pelosi and January 6 

Trump once again tried to blame former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi for the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol, saying that the California Democrat had turned down his offer of 10,000 National Guard troops to protect the Capitol that day and had admitted this in video taken by her own daughter.

“Nancy Pelosi, if you just watched the news from two days ago, on tape to her daughter, who is a documentary filmmaker … but she’s saying, ‘Oh, no, it’s my responsibility, I was responsible for this,’ because I offered her 10,000 soldiers, or National Guard, and she turned them down,” Trump said.

He added, “And I offered it to her. And she now admits that she turned it down.”

Facts FirstTrump’s claims about Pelosi’s role in Capitol security and in the deployment of the National Guard are false. The speaker of the House is not in charge of Capitol security; that is overseen by the Capitol Police Board, a body that includes the sergeants at arms of the House and the Senate. And the House speaker does not have power over the District of Columbia National Guard, which is under the command of the president. While there is no evidence Pelosi ever received a Trump offer of 10,000 soldiers on January 6, she would not even have had the power to turn down such an offer even if she had received one.

Trump also overstated what Pelosi said in a video recorded by her filmmaker daughter Alexandra Pelosi on January 6 and later obtained by House Republicans, who posted a 42-second snippet on social media earlier this month. Pelosi was shown expressing frustration at the inadequate security at the Capitol, and she said at one point, “I take responsibility for not having them just prepare for more.” But the short video doesn’t show her absolving Trump of responsibility or admitting she was the person in charge of Capitol security – and Pelosi continues to say it’s not true she turned down an offer of National Guard troops..

After Trump began referring to this clip earlier in June, Pelosi spokesperson Aaron Bennett said in an email to CNN: “Numerous independent fact-checkers have confirmed again and again that Speaker Pelosi did not plan her own assassination on January 6th. Cherry-picked, out-of-context clips do not change the fact that the Speaker of the House is not in charge of the security of the Capitol Complex — on January 6th or any other day of the week.”

In fact, another part of the video appears to undermine Trump’s frequent claims that Pelosi was the person who turned down a National Guard presence in advance of January 6. She said, “Why weren’t the National Guard there to begin with?”

The House select committee that investigated the attack on the Capitol found “no evidence” Trump gave any actual order for 10,000 Guard troops to anyone. Christopher Miller, Trump’s acting defense secretary at the time of the attack on the Capitol, testified to the committee that Trump had, in a phone call on January 5, 2021, briefly and informally floated the idea of having 10,000 troops present on January 6 but did not issue any directive to that effect. Miller said, “I interpreted it as a bit of presidential banter or President Trump banter that you all are familiar with, and in no way, shape, or form did I interpret that as an order or direction.”

From CNN’s Daniel Dale

Trump on migrants and crime

Trump claimed that migrants were entering the United States and killing women, saying that “these killers are coming into our country, and they are raping and killing women.”

Facts FirstThis needs context. Preliminary statistics show that crime in the US dropped significantly in 2023 and in the first quarter of 2024, with a steep drop in murders and other violent offenses, even as the number of people crossing the southern border spiked. While some undocumented immigrants have been charged with high-profile crimes during the Biden presidency, some undocumented immigrants committed serious crimes under Trump and previous presidents as well. And research has generally found no connection between immigration levels and crime – and has sometimes found that undocumented immigrants commit crimes at lower rates than people born in the US

Charis Kubrin, co-author of the 2023 book “Immigration and Crime: Taking Stock” and professor of criminology, law and society at the University of California, Irvine, told CNN’s Catherine Shoichet early this year:

“Across a variety of studies that use different years of data that focus on different areas of the United States — with some exceptions, there’s some nuance there. I don’t want to deny the nuance — in general, on average, we do not find a connection between immigration and crime, as is so often claimed. The most common finding across all these different kinds of studies is that immigration to an area is either not associated with crime in that area or is negatively associated with crime in that area. Meaning more immigration equals less crime. It’s rare to find studies that show crime following increases in immigration or with larger percentage of the population that are immigrants.”

Kubrin’s co-author, Graham Ousey, professor of sociology and criminology at the College of William & Mary, added: “A lot of people when you say that will then say, ‘Oh, well, but what about undocumented immigration?’ And there’s less research on that topic. But that body of research is growing, and it pretty much reaches the same conclusion.”

From CNN’s Priscilla Alvarez and Daniel Dale

Trump on the US share of NATO funding

During a dispute over who would do a better job countering Russia’s war in Ukraine, Trump criticized the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and how it is funded by its members, claiming he had learned after taking office that “almost 100% of the money was paid by us.”

Facts First: Trump’s claim is false.

Official NATO figures show that in 2016, the last year before Trump took office, US defense spending made up about 71% of total defense spending by NATO members – a large majority but not “almost 100%.” And Trump’s claim is even more inaccurate if he was talking about the direct contributions to NATO that cover the alliance’s organizational expenses and are set based on each country’s national income; the US was responsible for about 22% of those contributions in 2016.

The US share of total NATO military spending fell to about 65% in 2023. And the US is now responsible for about 16% of direct contributions to NATO, the same as Germany. Erwan Lagadec, an expert on NATO as a research professor at George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs and director of its Transatlantic Program, said the US share was reduced from 22% “to placate Trump” and is a “sweetheart deal” given that the US makes up more than half of the alliance’s total GDP.

From CNN’s Daniel Dale and Marshall Cohen 

Trump on the cost of food 

Trump claimed that Biden caused inflation and that it’s “killing” Americans, who “can’t buy groceries anymore” because the cost of food has “doubled and tripled and quadrupled.”

Facts First: Trump’s claims of food prices doubling, tripling and quadrupling are not entirely factual and could use some context.

Inflation’s rapid ascent, which began in early 2021, was the result of a confluence of factors, including effects from the Covid-19 pandemic such as snarled supply chains and geopolitical fallout (specifically Russia’s invasion of Ukraine) that triggered food and energy price shocks. Heightened consumer demand boosted in part by fiscal stimulus from both the Trump and Biden administrations also led to higher prices, as did the post-pandemic imbalance in the labor market.

Inflation peaked at 9.1% in June 2022, hitting a 41-year high, and has slowed since (the Consumer Price Index was at 3.3% as of May 2024). However, it remains elevated from historical levels. Three-plus years of pervasive and prolonged inflation has weighed considerably on Americans, especially lower-income households trying to afford the necessities (food, shelter and transportation).

Food prices, specifically grocery prices, did outpace overall inflation. However, they didn’t rise to the extent that Trump claims. Annual food and grocery inflation peaked at 11.4% and 13.5% in August 2022, respectively. Through the 12 months ending in May, overall food and grocery prices were up just 2.1% and 1%, respectively.

Certain food categories saw much greater inflation: Notably, egg prices were up 70% annually in January 2023. However, the underlying cause of that sharp increase was a highly contagious, deadly avian flu. Food prices are highly volatile and can be influenced by a variety of factors, including disease, extreme weather events, global supply and demand, geopolitical events, and once-in-a-lifetime pandemics.

From CNN’s Alicia Wallace

Biden on taxing billionaires 

Biden claimed that there are a thousand billionaires in the country who are “in a situation where they, in fact, pay 8.2% in taxes.”

Facts First: Biden used this figure in a way that was misleading. As in previous speeches, including the State of the Union address in March, Biden didn’t explain that the figure is the product of an alternative calculation, from economists in his own administration, that factors in unrealized capital gains that are not treated as taxable income under federal law.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with the alternative calculation itself; the administration economists who came up with it explained it in detail on the White House website in 2021. Biden, however, has tended to cite the figure without any context about what it is and isn’t, leaving open the impression that he was talking about what these billionaires pay under current law.

So, what do billionaires actually pay under current law? The answer is not publicly known, but experts say it’s clearly more than 8%. “Biden’s numbers are way too low,” Howard Gleckman, senior fellow at the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center at the Urban Institute think tank, told CNN in 2023. Gleckman said that in 2019, University of California, Berkeley, economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman “estimated the top 400 households paid an average effective tax rate of about 23% in 2018. They got a lot of attention at the time because that rate was lower than the average rate of 24% for the bottom half of the income distribution. But it still was way more than 2 or 3,” numbers Biden has used in some previous speeches, “or even 8%.”

In February 2024, Gleckman provided additional calculations from the Tax Policy Center. The center found that the top 0.1% of households paid an average effective federal tax rate of about 30.3% in 2020, including an average income tax rate of 24.3%.

From CNN’s Daniel Dale 

Biden on unemployment when he took office

In defending his record on the economy, Biden said that when he took office, “the economy was flat on its back. Fifteen percent unemployment. (Trump) decimated the economy. … That’s why there was not inflation at the time. There were no jobs.”

Facts First: Biden’s claim that the US unemployment rate was 15% when he took office is incorrect.  

In January 2021, the unemployment rate was 6.4%, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data.

The unemployment rate did near 15% during Trump’s presidency, but that occurred during April 2020, when the global and national economy were crushed by the emerging Covid-19 pandemic. In April 2020, the US lost more than 20 million jobs, resulting in unemployment skyrocketing from 4.4% in March 2020 to 14.8% in April 2020.

After peaking in April 2020, the unemployment rate declined substantially as the nation recovered those lost jobs (reaching pre-pandemic levels in June 2022) and gained millions more. The nation’s jobless rate is in the midst of a 30-month streak of being at or below 4%.

From CNN’s Alicia Wallace 

Trump on Biden’s tax plans 

Trump claimed that Biden is proposing to multiply Americans’ taxes by four times.

“He wants to raise everybody’s taxes by four times,” Trump said.

Facts First: This is false, just as it was when Trump made the same claim during the 2020 election campaign and in early 2024.

Biden has not proposed to quadruple Americans’ taxes, and there has never been any indication that he is seeking to do so. The nonpartisan Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center think tank, which analyzed Biden’s never-implemented budget proposals for fiscal 2024, found this: “His plan would raise average after-tax incomes for low-income households in 2024, leave them effectively unchanged for middle-income households, and lower after-tax incomes significantly for the highest-income taxpayers.”

The Tax Policy Center found that Biden’s proposal would, on average, have raised taxes by about $2,300 – but that’s about a 2.3% decline in after-tax income, not the massive reduction Trump is suggesting Biden wants. And critically, Tax Policy Center senior fellow Howard Gleckman noted to CNN in May that 95% of the tax hike would have been covered by the highest-income 5% of households.

The very biggest burden under the Biden plan would have been carried by the very richest households; the Tax Policy Center found that households in the top 0.1% would have seen their after-tax incomes decline by more than 20%. That’s “a lot,” Gleckman noted, but it’s still nowhere near the quadrupling Trump claims Biden is looking for. And again, even this increase would have been only for a tiny subset of the population. Biden has promised not to raise taxes by even a cent for anyone making under $400,000 per year.

From CNN’s Daniel Dale 

Trump on funding for Ukraine 

Trump claimed that the US has given more in aid to Ukraine than European countries put together.

“The European nations together have spent $100 billion, or maybe more than that, less than us,” Trump said.

Facts First: Trump’s claim is false. From just before Russia’s invasion in early 2022 through April 2024, European countries contributed more aid to Ukraine than the US, according to data from the Kiel Institute for the World Economy in Germany.

The Kiel Institute, which closely tracks aid to Ukraine, found that from late January 2022 (the month prior to Russia’s invasion) through April 2024, the European Union and individual European countries had committed a total of about $190 billion to Ukraine in military, financial and humanitarian assistance, compared with about $106 billion committed by the US. Europe also exceeded the US in aid that had been “allocated” to Ukraine – defined by the institute as aid either delivered or specified for delivery – at about $109 billion for Europe compared with about $79 billion for the US.

Additionally, Europe had committed more total military aid to Ukraine, at about $76 billion to about $69 billion for the US. The US narrowly led on military aid that had been allocated, at more than $50 billion for the US to less than $48 billion for Europe, but even that was nowhere near the lopsided margin Trump suggested.

It’s important to note that it’s possible to come up with different totals using different methodology. And the Kiel Institute found that Ukraine itself was getting only about half of the money in a 2024 US bill that had widely been described as a $61 billion aid bill for Ukraine; the institute said the rest of the funds were mostly going to the Defense Department.

From CNN’s Daniel Dale and Kaanita Iyer

Trump on the Veterans Choice program  

Trump took credit for the passage of the Veterans Choice health care law, referring to “Choice, that I got through Congress.”

Facts First: Trump’s claim is false. The Veterans Choice program was actually signed into law in 2014 by his predecessor, President Barack Obama. Trump signed a law in 2018, the VA MISSION Act, that expanded and modified the program established under Obama, and, as Trump has said, made the initiative permanent.

During Trump’s presidency, he falsely took credit for the Choice law more than 150 times.

From CNN’s Daniel Dale 

Trump on lowering the cost of insulin

Trump again tried to take full credit for lowering the cost of insulin for older Americans.

“I’m the one that got the insulin down for the seniors,” Trump said.

Facts FirstTrump’s claim that he was the one who reduced the cost of insulin for seniors is exaggerated. The former president did get a $35-per-month out-of-pocket cap on insulin for some seniors through a voluntary program that Medicare prescription drug plans could choose to participate in. But Biden ensured that all 3.4 million-plus insulin users on Medicare got $35-per-month insulin — through a mandatory cap that not only covers more people than Trump’s voluntary cap, but also applies to a greater number of insulin products and stays in effect at a level of individual drug spending at which Trump’s cap disappeared.

Trump could fairly say he played a role in lowering insulin costs and that Biden does not deserve sole credit. The Biden-era federal government has acknowledged that his mandatory $35 monthly cap, signed into law in his Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, “closely aligns with” the voluntary $35 monthly cap in the Trump-created model that was announced in 2020 and launched in the final month of the Trump presidency in 2021.

But Biden’s policy does more than Trump’s did in several substantive ways.

The Inflation Reduction Act measure applies the $35-per-month cap to every insulin user in Medicare Part D. Trump’s policy didn’t.

Biden’s policy imposes the mandatory $35 monthly cap on insulin taken via a pump, which is obtained through Medicare Part B. Under Trump’s program, the voluntary $35 monthly cap only applied to insulin obtained via Medicare Part D drug plans, such as insulin that is injected or inhaled.

The Inflation Reduction Act measure requires a $35 cap on all covered insulin products. Trump’s policy only required it on some.

Under Biden’s policy, people in Medicare Part D no longer have to make any payments for covered prescription drugs, including insulin, once they reach a very high level of annual drug spending known as the “catastrophic” level. Under Trump’s voluntary insulin program, the $35 monthly cap didn’t apply to those whose spending reached the “catastrophic” threshold, though many people likely paid less than $35 per month for insulin at that point regardless.

From CNN’s Daniel Dale and Tami Luhby 

Trump on funding HBCUs

Trump made a claim during the debate that he “funded” historically Black colleges and universities.

“When they see what I did for criminal justice reform and for the historically Black colleges and universities where I funded them and got them all funded,” Trump said.

Facts First: Trump is exaggerating here and his claims need context.

In 2019, Trump signed the FUTURE Act (Fostering Undergraduate Talent by Unlocking Resources for Education), a bipartisan bill aimed at strengthening HBCUs as well as other minority-serving institutions by providing $255 million annually.

“HBCUs have been underfunded for over 150 years, since inception. President Trump did sign measures into law that helped HBCUs tremendously (FUTURE Act and the first two COVID 19 packages). However, he never set out to do it,” Monique LeNoir, vice president of branding, marketing and communications for the United Negro College Fund (UNCF), told CNN. “Congress took the lead on putting the HBCU funding in those bills and passing them. The third COVID-19 bill, passed under President Biden, included as much funding for HBCUs as both of the first two COVID-19 bills under President Trump.”

Marybeth Gasman, executive director of the Rutgers Center for Minority Serving Institutions, echoed LeNoir, adding that Congress, during former President Barack Obama’s administration, also allocated funding to HBCUs.

“HBCUs are strong and resilient institutions, and they are that way because of Black people, Black leaders, Black alumni, Black students. They face obstacles but continue to persevere. They were not at risk of being out of operation — that’s a big overstatement,” Gasman told CNN.

The Trump administration also had a frayed relationship with HBCUs, and Trump’s views on funding for HBCUs have also not been consistent. In 2017, Trump questioned the constitutional basis for federal funding for HBCUs, saying, according to NPR, that “it benefits schools on the basis of race.”

CNN’s Chandelis Duster and Owen Dahlkamp

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Notes From a Quiet Street (Before We Forget Edition)

We’ve been on the road quite a bit for the last month, the last couple of weeks in particular (as noted Monday).  We’re going back through some notes we jotted down during the regrettably unprogressive legislative secession that seems to have ended a long time ago (Thank God!), and entering them before they age out.

For much of the session, I did not wear a necktie.  The proper professional dress for male legislators and for those who tell them how to vote is business casual at the least.  But a January tumble that dislocated my left shoulder made it impossible to tie a necktie for a few weeks, very uncomfortable to struggle to tie one for a few more, and then a moderate struggle to do so as the end drew near..

I rather enjoyed having a good excuse for not wearing a tie, even if I had to have my left arm in a sling to be convincing.

I was comforted on Easter Sunday by a blog piece by Robert Reich, the diminutive (4-feet-11 inches) former Secretary of Labor in the Clinton administration.

The Washington Post  reported two decades ago, when he ran for Governor of Massachusetts, “His tie hangs an inch and a half beneath his belt buckle, or just above his knees.”

If you are a guy and you have ever wished for a tie-less society, you might find Reich’s ruminations on the issue valuable:

(4) The end of the necktie? – Robert Reich (substack.com)

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Saw a newspaper article a few weeks ago about the reopening of closed church in Chula, a town of about 200 folks, near Chillicothe.  The church closed five years ago.  Seems that the place had become a large bee hive since the last chord was played on the piano or organ.

The article in The Pathway, a Missouri Baptist Convention publication described how Amanda Hicks, her husband, and a friend went in to clean the place and make it presentable for worship again only to be attacked by “a huge swarm of bees” that stung all three people several times before they could get to safety.

The bees eventually were uprooted, unhived, smoked out—there must be an appropriate phrase for such things—and the cleaning went on.

Among things removed—77 pounds of honey.

The newspaper says 20-25 people worship there now.  Wonder if they ever sing a hymn that should be the church theme song:  Sweet Jesus.

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No other sport can match baseball for having statistics that go beyond being obscure.  Here’s one from the early games.

Pitcher Marcus Stroman of the New York Yankees has set a record for most strikeouts by a pitcher no more than five feet-seven inches tall.  The record was first written down in 1901.  He has now struck out 1,131 batters in his career, surpassing former Cincinnati pitcher Dolf Luque, a 21-year big leaguer.

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One reason the Missouri legislature has been so unproductive is that video lottery terminal operators, although insisting their machines are legal, want to pass a law legalizing them.  The casino industry complains that the “VLT” is just a pseudonym for “slot machine,” and casinos are the only ones who can have legal slot machines and they don’t want anybody horning in on their business, even if the VLTs are far, far away from any of our 13 designated casinos.

Neither side will compromise and the legislature seemingly lacks the intelligence or the courage to draft a compromise and pass it, pressure from the VLT and Casino lobbyists notwithstanding.

Three years ago, Platte County Prosecutor Eric Zahnd became the only county prosecutor take serious action, getting a court to rule the machines illegal and crushing five of those machines in 2021.

Now there’s a second player—Springfield passed an ordinance in February declaring the machines illegal.

We’ve been kind of a vigilante on this issue.  We won’t do business with a convenience store that has the things.  At least, not locally.  Well, there is one—but it’s the only one I know of that pops popcorn every day.  I’ll spend a buck-50 maybe once a week there. But no gas.

Wonder if I can program my in-car GPS to show me stores without the machines?

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These machines bring to mind the tough old sergeant we had at the University of Missouri in the days when male students had to do two years of ROTC (Reserve Officers Training Corps to those too young to remember) who referred to Fort Leonard Wood as “the pimple on the butt of humanity.”  We consider VLTs to be pimples on the convenience store industry, bodily part not specified.

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We had another of life’s adventures a few weeks ago.  A sleep study.

From about 10:30 p.m. when we were ordered to bed and to go to sleep (I probably heard that order for the last time when I was about seven, if not earlier) until about 6 a.m., I tried to sleep in a strange bed with about two dozen wires attached from the top of my head down to my calves.

It did not go especially well but I was told afterwards that the machines had recorded “enough sleep” for a doctor to render an opinion about whether I was sleeping well, or well-sleeping.

The test recalls a joke Abraham Lincoln once told of a man who was being ridden out of town on a rail and when asked what he thought of the experience replied, “Well, if it wasn’t for the honor of the thing, I think I would rather walk.”

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The transfer portal is swinging both ways for colleges and universities these days. A lot of young men and women are moving from place to place almost yearly, looking for more money from the name-image-and-and likeness industry or more playing time to expose their talents to pro teams.

Wouldn’t you like to hear of one of these folks saying they’re transferring because the school of agriculture offers a better education?  Or the school of business?  Or the School of Education? Or Engineering?  Or the pre-med programs is better?

Collegiate sports is interesting but should fans be loyal to programs whose carpetbagging players have no loyalty in return?  I’ll watch the games on the teevee, and I often remember to do so, at least for football.  But I haven’t bought a ticket in years.

We think the NCAA needs a rule requiring schools to report the grade point averages of the carpetbagging players, some of whom already have their degrees. We’d like to know how many of these athletes even get a degree.

And that’s it for the sports curmudgeon today.

 

The Power Under Our Feet

If you think fossil fuels are the only way to power our lives, you need to go to Iceland. If Iceland doesn’t tickle your fancy (and don’t underestimate Iceland on this score; it’s surprising.), go to Texas.

If you think windmills should be forbidden because they kill birds, that nuclear power should be abolished because it leaves behind tons of dangerous waste, that electric-powered vehicles are actually uneconomical because it costs a lot of gas, oil, and coal for power plants to generate full  battery charges, that the use of oil, gas, and coal shorten lives, that water cannot turn enough turbines to light our cities—-you need to go to Iceland.  Or Texas.

Iceland first. We learned about this on a trip there just before the pandemic set in. We were attracted by the opportunity to see the northern lights.

And we did on a really cold night (we went in November).  Our guide—we called him “Fred” because we would have dislocated our jaws trying to pronounce name—took this one.

A 2020 study, the latest study we have seen, shows at least 90% of all homes in Iceland are NOT heated by nuclear, wind, or fossil fuel-generated power.  That study shows, in fact, that 99.94% of electricity generated in Iceland was geothermal or hydro-generated. Underground hot water and the water that powers the great waterfalls, in fact, provided 99.94% of all electricity generated in Iceland that year. And more than 70% of the total energy used in that country came from geothermal sources. The country wants to be carbon neutral by 2040.

Iceland has a lot of waterfalls—a lot!

Many of them are spectacular and they flow year-around. Why? Because glaciers melt from the bottom up in Iceland, even as winter puts down several feet of snow on top of them every year. The result is a lot of hydropower generation.

As far back as the Vikings, people have taken warm baths and washed their clothes in warm water even on the coldest days because of geothermal water-–water heated by the volcanic activity that created Iceland thousands of years ago and continues to alter its size today.

The number one use of geothermal heat in 2020 was space heating, then heating swimming pools, melting snow, fish farming, industry, and greenhouses (This is the Fridheimar     greenhouse that covers about 2.7 acres that uses pure  glacier water heated in a thermal pool to grow eighteen percent of the tomatoes used by the country—370 tons of them a year—on 20-foot high, or more, tomato vines throughout which about 1200 peaceful bumbleees maintain pollination, each of them capable of pollinating 2,000 flowers a day. The incredible tomato soup and bread for lunch are to die for.)

The Capital of Reykjavick, where about sixty percent of the country’s people live, has clear streets and sidewalks on snowy days because those streets and sidewalks are heated.  Water ranging from 100-300 degrees centigrade heats homes and is then diverted under the streets and sidewalks at 30 degrees centigrade (about 86 of our Fahrenheit degrees).

This issue has been highlighted by recent news coverage of some volcanoes that have become active in recent months. Some of the coverage has focused on the closure of the Blue Lagoon, the country’s most popular tourist attraction.  We were there.  And we floated in the geothermal waters.  The only way we could have drowned was by turning over and having somebody sit on us.

The lagoon’s water is a mixture of freshwater discharged from the Svartsengi Power Station and seawater.

Iceland didn’t officially recognize the power beneath national feet until about fifty years ago.  That’s when energy price inequities forced the national government to address the issue.   Orkustofnun, the National Energy Authority, recommended increased use of hydro and geothermal power to stabilize energy costs.  The Arab Oil Embargo that created an energy and economic crisis throughout the world led the Icelandic government to speed up its adoption of geothermal alternatives.

You might think that’s great for Iceland but the only significant place for geothermal activity here is Yellowstone National Park.  You are wrong. Take a look at this map of geothermal resources prepared by the Southern Methodist University  Geothermal Laboratory.

Texas might not look so hot in this map but it is a hotbed of geothermal energy development. The state well-known for its oil industry, says writer Saul Eblin for The Hill, is poised to dominate what boosters hope will be America’s next great energy boom: a push to tap the heat of the subterrnean earth for electricity and industry.”  He says Texas “is fueling a boom in startups that seek to take the issue nationally.

In March, he says, solar generation in Texas “eclipsed coal both in terms of power generation and market share.  Texas also has more utility-scale wind and solar capacity than any other state” although California still leads in rooftop solar power generation.

Last year, the Texas legislature passed four bills with only one “no” vote that will create new opportunities for geothermal drilling. Eblin says eleven of the nation’s 27 geothermal startups last year were in Texas and the momentum is building.

A few days ago, he reports, Bedrock Energy had a display at a commercial real estate company in Austin showing a new geothermal-powered heatng and cooling system. A few days earlier, Quaise, a drilling company, filed for a permit from state regulators to start field-testing drills that use high-powered radio waves to drill through dense rock. A company in Houston called Dervo, is building a 400-megawatt facility in Utah and the military is looking at geothermal source of electricity. Sage Geosystems soon will start using a fracked well to store renewable energy, a big step toward its goal of producing a reliable source of geothermal energy.

There are those who laugh at the electrification of America, particularly the growing emphasis on electric vehcles, claiming that the production fo electricity still requires fossil fuels and windmills and solar farms are nice but they limit use of land increasingly needed for food production.

But the heated water beneath our feet leapfrogs those arguments.  The SMU map indicates Missouri can produce 50-60 Milliwatts per square meter from underground water. One watt equals one millon milliwatts. Our calculation says Missouri has 180,540,000 square meters.  If we understand the math, that means 9,027,000,000-10,832,400,000 watts of geothermal power generation is beneath our feet.

If we do our math correctly, our largest utility, Ameren, generates 10,000 megawatts a year in Missouri, or about 10,000,000 watts per year.

Whether geothermal generation is an alternative for Ameren, we don’t know. But the company came under new federal pressure recently with the adoption of EPA new rules requiring coal-fired power plants to have new carbon pollution controls. The Post-Dispatch has reported more than half of Ameren’s power is generated by coal. Only Texas generates more power with coal. And Ameren’s Labadie plant in Franklin county is the number two power plant producer in the country.

So it appears we have enough thermal energy under our feet to generate as much as Ameren produces from all of its power plants, whether fossil or nuclear fueled in a year.  And Missouri isn’t even close to the geothermal potential other states who not only can serve their customers well but can export energy to other parts of the country, including to Missouri.

We have mentioned in earlier posts, one advantage to studying journalism in college was that no math courses were required.  If we have misunderstood these calculations, we welcome corrections.

Even if we are wrong, the experience of Iceland and elsewhere as well as the growing experience in Texas shows there is non-fossil energy enough beneath our feet to keep our lights on and to fuel our commerce indefinitely. But energy is politicized here. The fossil fuel industry slings a lot of money around in Washington and on campaign trails.  The Greenies, however, are making progress, incremental though it might be.

We might not be able to operate our cars on water but they can operate on the electricity generated by water, steaming hot water.  A 500-mile affordable electric car is growing closer.  But if we want to see the reality of a society powered by non-fossil fuels, Iceland is a flight of only five hours from Chicago O’Hare Airport. Take a coat, even in summer. It’s pretty far north.

Iceland as a country is one big ground source heat pump, north to south, east to west.

Super hot water beneath OUR feet is something to think about even here in relatively cool Missouri.

(Photo Credit: Bob Priddy)

 

King Lear and the Convicted Felon

A Shakespearian tragedy, some are calling the Trump conviction, not noting the irony of associating someone such as our former president with the talents of a great author about whom he likely has never read, at least with any understanding or appreciation.

One definition of a literary tragedy is a work in which the main character has “a tragic flaw, moral weakness, or inability to cope with unfavorable circumstances.”

That pretty well matches the main character of the drama we are witnessing.   Unfortunately, it also describes many of his acolytes who by their support of him are becoming characters like him.

Which of Shakespeare’s 17th Century tragic characters most resemble the convicted felon/tar baby that many political hopefuls are eager to get stuck to with increased firmness—an old man who rewards those most loyal to him and in doing so is taught the hard way that rewarding loyalty has its penalties?

King Lear is the story of a old man who wants to pass on his estate to the one of his three daughters who loves him best. Two daughters tolerate him at best but flatter him to win his favor. The third daughter, the one he actually loves the most, thinks he knows the feeling is mutual and therefore doesn’t butter him up as her two sisters do.  He vainly falls for the adulation of the two, cuts out the one he loves the most, and gives his estate to the manipulative sisters. He alternates staying with the two winners who treat him badly. As he grows more addled, he is left a vagrant.  Too late he realizes his mistake in favoring the two manipulative sisters but he cannot correct it because his beloved youngest daughter dies.

One of those who stays loyal to Lear is the Earl of Gloucester, who muses in a late section of the play, “’Tis the times’ plague when mad men lead the blind.”

Writer Lawrence Noel interprets the line this way:

The time’s plague refers to it being a problem of the time or era. Referring to it as a plague suggests that it spreads widely and quickly. We might even think of it as being contagious.

Blind people relied on others for guidance, especially in unfamiliar territory. Madmen are insane and cannot distinguish between reality and fantasy.

Putting those elements together suggests that the audience is being told that one of the problems of the time is that those who must trust others to provide them with safe passage in the world are being led by those who do not see the world clearly or in its own state of reality, even for themselves.

As an excerpt, it reflects an attitude about the nature of politics that resonates with modern readers and playgoers in that faith in the clarity of our political leaders’ vision of the world has suffered some setbacks of late. They may assure the common people that we are blind to the realities which only they can see and so we must accept their leadership if we want to go anywhere new. If the leader’s visions are distorted or unhealthy, we are likely to suffer for them.

“When mad men lead the blind.”  The line is sometimes misquoted but that’s what Shakespeare wrote.

Writer and playwright Charlotte Ahlin, who was raised by two Shakespearean actors, has written, “His plays are surprisingly (and sometimes upsettingly) still relevant to our daily lives.” Some of the reactions to the hush money verdict verify her contention.

Many of our political leaders or political leader-wannabes are (in some cases) disappointing us in accusing the Biden justice system of persecuting our former president strictly for partisan political purposes and encouraging the public to ignore that the supposedly weaponized Justice Department is prosecuting two members of Biden’s party—Senator Bob Menendez and Congressman Henry Cuellar, AND that a holdover Trump appointee in the Justice Department is prosecuting Presidential Son Hunter Biden.

The hypocrisy—-

The depth of the betrayal of their integrity—

Their lack of political courage—-

Their disregard for the title of “public servant” that they have sacrificed in pursuit of power—

are appalling.

The damage they are doing to public confidence in one of the most important institutions that define the United States as an example of a republican democracy—a trial by a jury of one’s peers—seems to mean nothing to them.  They are willing to become hostages to the political whims of a man of a kind they likely would not want their daughters to marry. They kowtow to a king who demands to be flattered.

They are gladly capitalizing on leading the blind—the people who don’t know and don’t want to think—in a concerted effort to let our former president hold on to power regardless of the damage he has openly announced he will do.

Listen again to what many of them said about him after January 6.

Listen again to what many of them said about him in their presidential primary campaigns, brief though they were.

Listen to what he has said about them or about members of their families.

Look at the list of those who he promised in 2016 to hire (only “the best people”) for his administration and count the number who have faced criminal charges/financial ruin or jail sentences for their loyalty—or who have written books exposing his machinations.

No president in all of American history has had so many books by his once-closest associates written about his personal and politica l failings.

And wonder why those who are now attacking our legal system as weaponized and corrupt feel they have to read from the script (look for words such as “witch hunt” or “banana republic”) he peddles on social media or during obsequious interviews.

And then, ask yourself this:

Have you ever served on a jury or do you know anyone who has?

This bunch is suggesting the people such as you and your friends, who assumed the responsibility as jurors in his recent trial, somehow connived with the Justice Department to politically persecute this man who has openly claimed to be above the law. Anyone who has been on a jury, or who has been called for consideration to be on a jury, should be insulted by what these bed partners of the now-convicted felon are saying.

If Donald Trump was treated unfairly in his trial, it was the fault of his attorneys and, perhaps himself; there are a lot of people who say the lawyers crafted their defense of him at least partly because of his demands.

He had his chance to claim in court what he loves to claim outside of the court. As he has in the past, he said at the start of the trial that he would love to testify.  But in the end, he chickened out. Again.  He could have told his side of the story but, as he has done in the past, he did not.

—-Because he would have had to take an oath to tell the truth and he is incapable of doing so.

His lawyers helped pick the jury. To refresh your memory, here’s the kind of people they were, thanks to a compilation by NBC News.

Juror 1: A man who lives in West Harlem and works in sales. He is married, likes to do “anything outdoorsy,” and gets news from The New York Times, Fox News and MSNBC.

Juror 2: A man who works in investment banking, follows Twitter as well as Truth Social posts from Trump and said, “I don’t have any beliefs that might prevent me from being fair or impartial.”

Juror 3: A young man who has lived in Chelsea for five years, works as an attorney in corporate law, and likes to hike and run. He gets news from The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and Google.

Juror 4: A man who’s a security engineer and likes woodworking and metalworking.

Juror 5: A young woman who is a Harlem resident and works as a teacher. She lives with her boyfriend, loves writing, theater and traveling. She gets news from Google and TikTok and listens to podcasts on relationships and pop culture.

Juror 6: A young woman who lives in Chelsea and works as a software engineer. She gets news from The New York Times, Google, Facebook and TikTok.

Juror 7: A man who lives on the Upper East Side and works as attorney as a civil litigator. He enjoys spending time in the outdoors and gets his news from The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Post and the Washington Post.

Juror 8: A man who’s retired but worked for a major wealth manager. He said he enjoys skiing, fly fishing and yoga.

Juror 9: A woman who is a speech therapist, gets news from CNN and likes reality TV podcasts.

Juror 10: A man who works in commerce, reads The New York Times and listens to podcasts on behavioral psychology.

Juror 11: A woman who works as a product development manager and watches late-night news and reads Google, business and fashion news.

Juror 12: A woman who is a physical therapist who likes running and tennis and listening to podcasts on sports and faith.

Alternate 1: A woman who works as an asset manager and likes to run, hang out with her friends and eat.

Pretty formidable list of persecutors who are tools of the Justice Department, don’t you think, especially since this trial was in a state court not a federal court where the Justice Department has a role?

The fact that it took this varied group only about eleven hours to unanimously convict our former president on every one of the THIRTY-FOUR charges speaks volumes for the strength of the case against him, the presentation of the evidence that supported all of those charges, and the inability of Trump and his lawyers to induce even one of the twelve to hang the jury.

There was nothing wrong with the justice system that day.

How strange it is that those sycophants, including several of our Missouri statewide candidates who also have swallowed gallons of the Trump Kool-Aid, to now expect a flawed justice system weaponized to get him and him alone to later exonerate a  president who tried during his own term to weaponize the Department of Justice.

Mad men. And some women leading “the blind,” people who don’t want to know but will blindly accept what they are told.  And the mad men are happy to lead them, happy to tell them.  And why?  Because they want power and lack the integrity to win it on their own standards.

They have, instead, attached themselves to arguably the least honest man in the country who spouts lies and lies and lies. And too many of our political leaders or leader wannabes are disgracing themselves in joining him in trying to disgrace those responsible citizens who fulfilled a sacred role in our society during his trial.

They have become dangerous in their service to an old king who thinks one-way loyalty is his privilege. They are the mad men.  We must not be blind to them.

Those who refuse to be blind can make sure they pay a price for their hypocrisy, their lack of integrity, honesty, and of courage when we vote in August and November.

 

All 34

My God!

The enormity of a jury’s verdicts in a New York courtroom yesterday is difficult to grasp whether one is strongly anti-Trump or whether one is violently pro-Trump.  Years from now, generations unborn today will read in their history books of yesterday’s verdict as cold fact with no way to understand the depth of the national emotions triggered by a jury ruling that a former President of the United States is guilty of 34 felonies.

Thirty-four.

The number will never be the same, just as 9-11 was transformed into something beyond  a numerical value, just as 1-6 is a waymark in American history.

Some hoped the jury would issue 34 NOT guily verdicts; many—perhaps most—thought at least SOME guilty verdicts would come.   But all 34?

It is stunning.  And although there will be appeals, it seems impossible that all 34 convictions will be reversed.

Donald Trump can and will—already has—repeated his attacks on the judge, the prosecutor, the jury.

But twelve people, chosen in the historically-honored system of picking a jury of fellow citizens, have convincted him of 34 crimes.

What must it be like away from his normal public bluster when this  77-year old man realizes  that for the first time in his life, he has not been able to control or to ignore the responsibility for his actions?  In the privacy of his own rooms and with his own thoughts, what must this overwhelming rebuke of the way he has run his life be doing to him?  He may rage in public and in private but surely he knows, deep down, many of those he has bent to his will are now realizing his blood is in the water and they must transform themselves into sharks for their own self-preservation.

The bus is waiting.  How many of those he thought he controlled will decide it’s time he is the one thrown under it?

Much is made that he is the first president to face criminal charges and now the first to be convicted, a statement though often repeated has no practical effect.  Once just a frequently-spoken statement, now it is a statement of national tragedy.

And what shall be done with him, this man who has flouted decency, honor, and the law throughout his life of self-seeking power?

If the convictions are upheld he should go to prison, whatever form prison takes.

Prison for Donald Trump could mean being cut off from public participation in events, to being relegated to a world without spotlight, a world of tightly-scheduled activities from waking up to eating a common menu, to being isolated from public exposure, restricted perhas to a couple of rooms at Mar-a-Lago where visitors are allowed only at certain times and certain days.  His greatest punishment could be imposed insignificance in contemporary times.

Yesterday was a day that instantly became history and we knew it the second we heard of the verdicts.  For both those who hoped for a different result as well as those who hoped for the result that came, yesterday was a “My God!” day.

Today we will try to grasp what has just happened, what we have experienced. Maybe for some of us as well as for him, it might take more than just today.

 

A “Day” in the Life of the Senate

This Senate Journal for Monday, May 13, 2024 also is the journal for Tuesday and Wednesday because of a record filibuster, led by Democrats demanding so-called “ballot candy” be removed from a resolution saying no constitutional amendment could be adopted unless it carried in a majority of the state’s eight congressional districts, even if the overall vote was favorable. Democrats, already opposed to the resolution, objected to language added by the House duplicating existing law but making the proposal more appealing to the public—the “ballot candy” opponents wanted removed.

This might be dry reading to those who are not as immersed in state government as your obedient servant has been for most of his life.  We are doing this to place these events in a better record than the Senate Journal provides.

The journal for the “day” that turned into the “fifty-hour filibuster” led by the ten Democrats in the 34-member Senate is covered on pages 1059-1061 of the daily journal (the daily journals are compiled at the end of the session into one large volume, thus these page numbers pick up with the journal page number of the preceding day).  The rest of “Monday’s” journal is made up of messages from the House telling the Senate it has approved its own bills, has changed Senate bills and needs Senate approval of the changes, requests for conference committees to work out differences between the two chambers on various bills, and other routine legislative business.

Because the House of Representatives’ rules limit debate time, filibusters do not occur there.  But the Senate has no such restrictions and a parliamentary procedure called “moving the previous question,” which—if approved—immediately ends debate and calls for a vote, is seldom used.

Because the journal is a record of actions, not a by-word recording of the debates, the only indication that a filibuster occurred is the listings of the names of those who presided over the chamber at various times. The number of names is an indication of the extensive length of the filibuster.  The fact that there are no journals for Tuesday and Wednesday is another indication.

Legislative “days” are not calendar or clock-determined.  A legislative day ends with adjournment. In this case, a “Monday” lasted until Wednesday on the calendar while, for journal purposes, the legislative day was still Monday.  Adjournment in this case did not occur until some Republicans crossed party lines to join the Democrats in sending the bill back to the House with a request for a conference.  The House on Thursday rejected the Senate’s request, telling the Senate to pass the House Committee Substitute.   Senate leadership knew that the minority Democrats would resume their filibuster if the bill was returned to the floor unchanged and would run out the clock at 6 p.m. on calendar Friday.  Because there was no use spending the last day of the session in a filibuster, the Senate adjourned after a ten-minute session Friday.

We have consulted the Senate archived recording of this long “Monday” to ascertain the exact amount of time the filibuster consumed.  We have done this because this event was unprecedented in Missouri legislative history and smashed a previous unprecedented 41-hour filibuster a few days earlier by the right-wing Senate Freedom Caucus.

Monday, May 13, 2024:   Sponsor Mary Elizabeth Coleman moved that the Senate adopt House Committee Substitute for Senate Substitute Number 4 for Senate Committee Substitute for Senate Joint Resolutions 74, 48, 59, 61, and 83.  That sounds complicated but it represents the path the bill had taken to that point.

There were five similar resolutions on this issue filed in the Senate.  A Senate Committee combined those resolutions into one but not before the entire Senate had debated the bill and three substitute versions were voted down, leaving the fourth that gained enough voter for passage.

The amended and combined Senate resolution went to the House where a House Committee substituted its version. The House passed the revised bill.  The changes had to be approved by the Senate before the proposition could be put on a statewide ballot.

Monday, May 13 was the first day of the last week of the 2024 legislative session. Democrats, outnumbered more than 2-1, knew the clock was their greatest friend when it came to getting this proposition changed or killed.  They launched a filibuster that blocked a vote that surely would have sent the issue to the November ballot.

Our legislature records its debates and archives them.  We went to the May 10 audio journal and tracked how much time was spent on this bill in each day.  The Senate archive recording resets to 0:00 at the end of each 24 hours.

Day One, Monday, May 13.

0:00:00—The Senate begins its “day” with a prayer from Reverend Stephen George.

0:04:52—Senator Mary Elizabeth Coleman moves Senate approval of  HCS/SS4/SCS/SJR 74, 48, 59, 61 and 83.

0:06:15—Senate Minority Leader John Rizzo makes substitute motion to send the bill back to the House and to ask for a conference committee to work out the differences between the House version, which had “ballot candy” added to it, and the Sente version.  This is the beginning of the filibuster.

“Monday” part one (Monday-Tuesday on the traditional calendar): 24 hours, of which 23 hours, 53 minutes and 45 seconds were spent filibustering the resolution. Running filibuster time: 23:53:45.

“Monday” part two (Tuesday-Wednesday on the traditional calendar): all 24 hours were involved in the filibuster. Running filibuster time: 47:53:45

“Monday” part three (Wednesday on the traditional calendar); 02:15:36  Roll call vote begins.  Roll call results announced: 02:18:06. The motion to send bill back to the House passed 18-13, with eight Republicans crossing party lines. The filibuster is official ended.

02:24:41: The Senate adjourns until Thursday morning.  “Monday,” the longest known “day” in Missouri Senate history, has finally come to an end.

Total filibuster time: 50:11:51

Total time of “Monday, May 10, 2024” in the Missouri Senate: 50:24:41.

Miserable, Just Miserable

The Missouri Constitution establishes a definite date each year for adjournment of the Missouri General Assembly.  This was one of those years when adjournment couldn’t happen soon enough.

This miserable session will be remembered as the session that a handful of Republican senators calling themselves the Freedom Caucus ran into the ground because a majority of their party didn’t buy their demands.  They accused the majority of their majority party of being RINOS, a nickname our former president likes to apply to any Republican who does not love him. There is considerable reason to consider far-out clusters such as this as the real Republicans in Name Only.

This will be remembered as the Session of the Filibuster.  The Freedom Caucus kicked off the session with a lengthy discussion of Senate procedure, filibustered for eleven hours trying to force colleagues to act quickly on bills making it harder for citizens to create laws through initiative petition. That led President Pro Team Caleb Rowden to strip four members of the Freedom Caucus of their committee chairmanships and (this seemed to be the most terrible punishment to some of them) took away their parking spaces in the Capitol basement.  Senators Bill Eigel, the ringleader of the caucus, Rick Brattin, Denny Hoskins and Andrew Koenig lost their prestigious positions, after which Eigel stopped action in the Senate for four more hours so he could question several Senators who seemed to support Rowden’s action.

Rowden calculated in late January that the Senate had been in floor session for 17 hours and 52 minutes in 2024. He said the Freedom Caucus had filibustered “things of no consequence whatsoever relative to a piece of policy” for 16 hours and 45 minutes of that time.

And it only got worse. But in the end, the filibuster bit the Freedom Caucus—uh—in the end.

As the session reached May and the crucial last couple of weeks, including the week in which the state budget had to be approved, the caucus stopped things cold for 41 hours—believed to be the longest filibuster in Missouri legislative history—because its priorities were not THE priority of Senate leadership.

But that filibuster record was to be broken in the final week when Democrats and some Republicans fed up with the Freedom Caucus’s behavior got in the way of final approval of the resolution changing the way the state constitution can be changed. Those who had lived by the filibuster died by the filibuster.

The final filibuster lasted FIFTY hours and change. It succeeded where the Freedom Caucus belligerency failed. The Freedom Caucus’ bull-in-a-china shop philosophy of government was repudiated by a Senate that seemed to, in this case at least, rediscovered bipartisanship. But the damage done by this group could not be reversed.

The 2024 legislative session was the least productive in modern memory—or even ancient memory, for that matter.  Only 28 non-budget bills were passed.

That beats the record of 31 in the 2020 session.  But remember, that was the Pandemic Session when the legislature did not meet for several days then operated on a limited basis for several other days.

Eigel disavowed responsibility for that miserable record.  “A lot of bad things that didn’t happen this session didn’t happen because of the people standing behind me,” he said in a post-session Freedom Caucus press conference. His words probably didn’t carry any water with Senators and Representatives who had worked hard and conscientiously on bills that would have done GOOD things only to see them disappear into the ongoing mud fight in the Senate led by Eigel and his band.

Eigel has dreams of becoming Governor.  Denny Hoskins thinks he’d be a peachy Secretary of State. Andrew Koenig thinks being State Treasurer would be wonderful. Rick Brattin just hopes to get elected to another term in the Senate.

There are some folks who have watched them this year who hope they still don’t have parking places in Jefferson City in 2025.

The 50-hour filibuster deserves a closer look. We’ve taken that look to establish the exact length of it so that future observers will know when they have witnessed an even more regrettable example.

Incidentally, it is believed the longest filibuster by one person in Missouri history was Senator Matt Bartle’s futile effort to block some gubernatorial appointments in 2007. He held the floor for seventeen hours.

How to be a Leftist With One Word

The word is “Democracy.”

The denigrating reference to one of the most honored words in our American existence was stunning when I read it.

“Democracy” seems to have become a bad word for some people.

The Jefferson City newspaper had an article yesterday about whether our city council elections should become partisan political elections again.  The City Charter adopted three or four decades ago made council elections non-partisan.  But in last month’s city elections, the county Republican committee sent out postcards endorsing candidates.

All of them lost.

A new political action committee established to oppose a Republican-oriented committee that killed a library tax levy increase last year had its own slate last month. All of the non-GOP candidates won, which prompted a leading member of the GOP-oriented group to comment in the paper that the new PAC, as the paper put it, “used leftist buzzwords like ‘transparency’ and ‘Democracy’ on their website.”

Friends, when things have gone so far out of whack that “Democracy” is nothing more than a “leftist buzzword,” our political system is in extremely perilous condition.   And if the same side considers “transparency” to be something that is politically repugnant, it appears that a substantial portion of our political system has abandoned one of the greatest principles of our national philosophy—-that government of the people, for the people, and by the people should not hide what it does from its citizens.

City councils are the closest governments to the people.  Elections of members of city councils should focus on the issues that most directly affect residents of wards and cities, not on whether candidates can pass party litmus tests or mouth meaningless partisan rhetoric.

The Jefferson City newspaper spent weeks publishing articles giving candidates’ opinions on the issues that confront citizens living on the quiet (and some noisy) streets of the city. Voters had ample opportunities to evaluate candidates on THEIR positions, not whether they were an R or a D.

Bluntly put, the county Republican committee did not respect the non-partisan system that has served our city well for these many decades.  And to have one of its leading characters dismiss words such as “transparency” and—especially—“Democracy” as “leftist buzzwords” is, I regret to say, a disgrace.

The (Robert) Reich Stuff 

We subscribe to several newsletters at our house, liberal and conservative, because we kind of want to take the pulses of the various parts of the political spectrum. One of those we enjoy is by Robert Reich.

He worked in the administrations of Republican Gerald Ford and Democrats Jimmy Carter, and was Bill Clinton’s Secretary of Labor. He also was part of President Obama’s economic transition advisory board.

He’s been the Chancellor’s Public Policy Professor at UC-Berkeley for eighteen years. He used to be a lecturer in government at Harvard, and a prof of social and economic policy at Brandeis University. Time magazine said he was one of the ten best cabinet members of the Twentieth Century (2008) and ranked sixth on the Wall Street Journal’s list of Most Influential Business Thinkers.

So it appears he has some pretty solid bipartisan credentials.

A few days ago, he explained why prices remain high despite the slowing of inflation. His explanation recalls a warning I heard thirty years ago or more from Abner Womack, an Ag-Econ professor at the University of Missouri, a co-founder of the Food and Agricultural Policy Research Institute.  He warned of the dangers of vertical integration in the agriculture industry—a time when only a few companies controlled the agriculture industry from providing the seeds, providing the fertilizer, processing the harvested product, and marketing it to consumers, and doing the same thing with the livestock part of agriculture. In effect, he was talking about the growing tendency of creating agricultural monopolies.

In his column on February 16, Reich began with a chart:

The chart shows corporate profit trends from 1946 through the third quarter of 2023.

This, he says, is why President Biden is not getting the credit he deserves to improving the economy—-corporate monopolities are unnecessarily increasing prices, or charging the same prices but reducing the size of the products.  For example, he says—

“In 2021, PepsiCo, which makes all sorts of drinks and snacks, announced it was “forced” to raise prices due to “higher costs.” Forced? Really? The company reported $11 billion in profit that year

“In 2023 PepsiCo’s chief financial officer said that even though inflation was dropping, its prices would not. Pepsi hiked its prices by double digits and announced plans to keep them high in 2024.

“How can they get away with this? 

“Well, if Pepsi were challenged by tougher competition, consumers would just buy something cheaper. But PepsiCo’s only major soda competitor is Coca-Cola, which — surprise, surprise — announced similar price hikes at about the same time as Pepsi, and also kept its prices high in 2023.

“The CEO of Coca-Cola claimed that the company had “earned the right” to push price hikes because its sodas are popular. Popular? The only thing that’s popular these days seems to be corporate price gouging.” 

And that is why, he explains, consumer prices are still high even though inflation is down and prices are rising “far more slowly” than in the past couple of years. However, those trends are not reflected in the prices of the products.  The result is that the corporations can “get aay with overcharging you” because corporations have few competitors who can force them to lower prices to compete for customers.

Why are prices thirty percent higher than they were in 2020?  Because “four companies now control processing of 80 percent of beef, nearly 70 percent of pork, and almost 60 percent of poultry.”  He suggests, but offers no proof, that these companies coordinate price increases.

Reich says it’s time federal antitrust laws be enforced, noting the Biden administration has been more aggressive in this field than any administration for the last forty years. It has acused the meat industry of price fixing. The administration is suing Amazon with “one of the biggest anti-monopoly lawsuits in a generation.”

He points to legislation suggested by Senator Elizabeth Warren and others. She says, “Giant corporations are using supply chain shocks as a cover to excessively raise prices and sometimes charging the same price but shrinking how much consumers actually get.”  Among other things, the bill would force public companies to divulge more about their costs and pricing strategies.

But, he says, don’t expect this idea to go far because Democrats have only a slim majority in the Senate and Repulicans have a slim majority in the House that enables them and their business allies to blame the Biden administration instead of solving the problem by going after that important constituency for the GOP.

So ends Robert Reich’s basic economic course for the day. He’s clearly a liberal but that doesn’t automatically mean he’s not worth appreciating any more than a conservative’s thoughts are automatically worthy of dismissal.  And those who wear the label “conservative” honorably will find some points of agreement with him, perhaps.

Late in the 1890s and early 1900s, it was popular in politics to be a “trust buster.”  Reich has suggested targets for a new generation of them.

It’s time to get started.